"Drone Shark Ethics"

By Dr. Abner Mality

This is a throwback to the days of silly crossover bands. Boatloads of speed, short songs, skateboards, snide lyrics, horrid vocals, more skateboards and cartoony cover art. Plus skateboards. Acid Age from Ireland remembers. Or maybe they're just catching up with it. One look at the dire cover for "Drone Shark Ethics" and you know exactly what you are in for.

I was never a huge fan of this style of thrash and probably never will be. But there are times when Acid Age evoke the goofiness of 1988/89 so well that you''ll be doing a double take at your calendar. One thing I have to admit is that the guitarist here totally SHREDS! Extremely impressive and awesomely fast thrash picking rears its toothy head on cuts like the title track, the self-explanatory "Hyper Thrash", "`10,000 Robot Archers" and "Women With No W". The drummer tries manfully to keep up but doesn't always succeed. As good as the guitarist is, that's how bad the vocalist is. Lots of horrible tuneless yammering that seems to be actively fighting against the riffs. Occasionally he'll hit the right note, but not too often.

It's an uneven record to say the least. Having an 18 second blur called "Big Long Song" is about as funny as getting infected with ebola. The Elvis cover "Hound Dog", mutated into a 1000 bpm screamer, is horrific. But there's something perversely goofy about what Acid Age is up to that gets to you after a while. If you can take bad vocals and worse humor and like your music to move at Autobahn speeds, give them a shot.